English

Multilingual Training and Evaluation Resources for Vision-Language Models

Computation and Language 2026-04-21 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Vision Language Models (VLMs) achieved rapid progress in the recent years. However, despite their growth, VLMs development is heavily grounded on English, leading to two main limitations: (i) the lack of multilingual and multimodal datasets for training, and (ii) the scarcity of comprehensive evaluation benchmarks across languages. In this work, we address these gaps by introducing a new comprehensive suite of resources for VLMs training and evaluation spanning five European languages (English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish). We adopt a regeneration-translation paradigm that produces high-quality cross-lingual resources by combining curated synthetic generation and manual annotation. Specifically, we build Multi-PixMo, a training corpus obtained regenerating examples from Pixmo pre-existing datasets with permissively licensed models: PixMo-Cap, PixMo-AskModelAnything, and CoSyn-400k. On the evaluation side, we construct a set of multilingual benchmarks derived translating widely used English datasets (MMbench, ScienceQA, MME, POPE, AI2D). We assess the quality of these resources through qualitative and quantitative human analyses, measuring inter-annotator agreement. Additionally, we perform ablation studies to demonstrate the impact of multilingual data, with respect to English only, in VLMs training. Experiments, comprising 3 different models show that using multilingual, multimodal examples for training VLMs aids is consistently beneficial on non-English benchmarks, with positive transfer to English as well.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.18347,
  title  = {Multilingual Training and Evaluation Resources for Vision-Language Models},
  author = {Daniela Baiamonte and Elena Fano and Matteo Gabburo and Stefano Simonazzi and Leonardo Rigutini and Andrea Zugarini},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.18347},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T12:18:30.503Z